Shimmer is an abstract animation set in an open museum-like environment meant to evoke feelings of wonder, growth, transformation and mystery.
The concept for Shimmer originally came from wanting to recreate some images of glitter and powder explosions that I had found on Pinterest way back in the summer of 2018. At first it was an opportunity to learn some new techniques, but it quickly became an abstract personal project for me to complete as I developed a sequence of thumbnails
and created a mood board with inspirational imagery.
The project came together relatively easy at first until I began trying to create the morphing geometric shell and the explosion itself. Both of those were the hero elements of the whole animation, and proved to be a big challenge for me. On top of that, I couldn't land on a design for the environment and I was really struggling with the lighting of the entire scene. Over time, I sort of gave up on the project and would only tinker with parts here and there. It wasn't until I decided to make a plan that stuff started coming together.
In late 2021 I decided to just focus on relearning lighting in 3D as well as figuring out the morphing geometric shell. Tim Clapham's lighting course was a huge help for learning creatively lighting a scene. The most challenging part by far was the particle explosion. I had tried several things including Houdini, but wanted to see if I could accomplish it in Cinema 4D. After testing and going through forum threads, I stumbled across MotionPunk's Patreon that helped me solve this. He has some great content teaching X-Particles and Octane Renderer.
